Them: "We're shutting down X because too few people use it. Also, announcing Y!"
Users: "I'm not using Y. You'll probably shut it down."
[months pass]
Them: "We're shutting down Y because too few people use it."
The brand recognition that they hope will make Y successful might actually work against it.
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?
It did have users. I have no idea the exact number, and clearly it wasn't as many as Facebook, but it wasn't the ghost town people always made it out to be. Some of the Communities were actually quite active.
There are a lot of RPG communities, and a lot of roleplayers and RPG designers who don't even use Communities because G+ already is a community. Communities are a later addition, and G+ works fine without them.
That's the tragedy. It's a business that became one of the richest companies in the world in a few years, obtaining massive capital looking for investments along the way. It then holds all those investments (of money or time or intelligence) to the same standard of success and failure.
No. We use a small part of the people API in production and will have to make changes in our code to avoid breakage. IIRC various points in Google's documentation pointed us to the more modern people API for our desired use case, away from "older" APIs which we will now have to revert back to...
Loads of people are depending on it, in spite of all Google's constant attempts to kill it. It started out as the best social network, and I've gotten to know tons of great people, projects and products there. It has really enriched my life in a way I don't see Facebook or Twitter doing. My Google+ friends and I will definitely miss it.
They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?